About my background, I have a Bachelor’s degree in Biology from Harvard and a Ph.D. from the University of Adelaide in Australia, studying the evolution of mammals on the island of New Guinea. My work focuses especially on biological expeditions to the tropics and historical research in museum collections to document mammalian biodiversity and to study environmental change. I've worked as a zoologist in 50 countries and discovered 100 species of living mammals. I'm originally from Minnesota and now live in Virginia with my wife Lauren Helgen, also a zoologist.

Olinguitos are not at all fierce animals, but they are shy! But we are only just starting to learn about the behavior of olinguitos!

The name Olinguito comes from combing olingo + ito. Olingo to designate that it is closely related to olingos, and -ito to mean little. -ito can also be added as a term of affection! So "Olinguito" more or less means "little, adorable olingo"!

As far as we have been able to find out, it is also unknown to locals. Judging from local Andean language terms and from talking to people, it seems people rarely distinguish between kinkajous and olingos, let alone olinguitos. Part of the confusion is that in some areas of middle elevation forests in the Andes, you can have kinkajous, olingos, and olinguitos all living in the same general area, and they are all pretty hard to tell apart when you see them at night up in the trees. If we had found a local language name that definitively applied to the olinguito (and not also to olingos or kinkajous), we would have loved to have used that name as the common or scientific name of this animal that we have called the Olinguito.

A species is often defined as a group of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring. Scientists now believe an olinguito was exhibited in several zoos in the US between 1967 and 1976. Its keepers mistook it for an olinga - a close relative - and could not understand why it would not breed. It was sent to a number of different zoos but died without being properly identified.

Three sources of evidence show us that Olinguitos and olingos do not interbreed:
1.they can live in the same geographic region in the Andes without interbreeding;
2. they are very different genetically and separated by milions of years of independent evolution;
3. a female Olinguito that once lived in zoos (mistakenly thought to be an olingo, in various US zoos 1967-1976) would not breed with olingos, despite many attempts to get her to breed.

Is there a way to tell whether this particular species has been around for a long time or has recently branched off another species? Have you ever encountered something new that was really new, and not just undiscovered?

"New species" is a label that scientists use to refer to animals that have recently been distinguished by biologists and given a scientific name. Hence, the Olinguito is a new species, since it was first given its scientific name (Bassaricyon neblina) in 2013 (yesterday), as compare to, say, the North American raccoon, which was first given its scientific name (Procyon lotor), in 1758.

The term "new species" generally does NOT mean that the species is an immediate offshoot that has just now evolved. Species of mammals that are called "new species" of mammals have usually existed for hundreds of thousands to millions of years as independent lines of evolution, but have only just been described by taxonomists. We have estimated (from comparisons of DNA) that the Olinguito has been on a separate evolutionary branch from its closest relatives, the olingos, for 3-4 million years.

On the news last night, they mentioned that one of these creatures lived in a zoo in America for years. How is it possible that an unknown mammal was living in a zoo, unidentified, for so long? Is it a very slight difference between the olinguito and an olingo? Just from the photos I've seen, their physical appearance looks different enough that I would expect someone to start asking questions.

An example like this shows you how little we truly know about the natural world, and how easy it is to overlook even something as distinctive as the Olinguito for so long. Once we know their differential features and how to tell them apart, it's often easy in hindsight to recognize an animal species when we see it--but not before someone does the work to find out exactly what all those distinguishing features really are. That's what happened with the Olinguito-- before my team's efforts, no one had looked closely enough to see all the ways that the Olinguito was different from olingos. These issues of "mistaken identity" are surprisingly common in biology. Studying specimens stored in museum collections (not on display, but behind the scenes in scientific collections) has traditionally been the way that scientists have learned how to tell different animals apart-- once that work is done, and you know a species' true distinguishing features, you can then often use photos or observations to make an ID (first museum work, then a field guide). Today one of the most robust ways to learn how to tell species apart is to make anatomical comparisons of museum specimens PLUS look at differences in DNA.

Dr. Helgen, thanks so much for the great Google Hangout and immediately coming over here. Question: Why haven't you used your personal Twitter account @khelgen? You have tons of new fans and mammalogy enthusiasts.

Hey, thanks for coming to the Google Hangout. So-- as you can see--I've never tweeted, and you're right, this might be a good time to get started! I like to find as many ways as possible to get the word out about science and about our discoveries, so it's probably time to get @khelgen started in the twitterverse!

It took us ten years. It took so long in part because I work on a large number of projects like this (20 or so) at a time, and because I wanted to be very thorough! Our paper documenting the Olinguito involved comparisons of specimens in dozens of museums around the world, fieldwork in Ecuador, laboratory work on DNA (including using "ancient DNA" techniques to obtain DNA out of old museum skulls), geographic range modeling, and much else, and involved a team of 8 scientists. All of that work started in 2003, when I first found Olinguito skins and skulls in a museum cabinet in the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Everyone else had missed their distinguishing features.

Yes, that is one way to look at it! But generally, in science, a "discovery" is not credited to the first person to see or come across something (e.g. a species or a phenomenon), but to someone who explains its context, significance, how it all works. Our team of scientists was the first to realize and demonstrate that the Olinguito was a very different species than any other known mammal and that it did not yet have a scientific name.